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COPnUCHT DEPOSIT. 



The Arnold Bennett Calendar 



BY ARNOLD BENNETT 



NOVELS 

The Old Wives' Tale 

Helen with the High Hand 

The Matador of the Five Towns 

The Book of Carlotta 

Buried Alive 

A Great Man 

Leonora 

Whom God Hath Joined 

A Man from the North 

Anna of the Five Towns 

The Glimpse 

POCKET PHILOSOPHIES 

How TO Live on 24 Hours A Day 
The Human Machine 
Literary Taste 
Mental Efficiency 

PLAYS 

Cupid and Commonsense 
What the Public Wants 
Polite Farces 
Milestones 
The Honeymoon 

MISCELLANEOUS 

The Truth About an Author 
The Feast of St. Friend 



GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK 



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COPYRIGHT, 1912 
BY GfeORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



THH'PlIMPTOIf'PRBSS 

[ W • D • O ] 
NORWOOD -M ASS -U^S-A 



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E 



NOCH ARNOLD BENNETT was born at 
Hanley-in-the-P otter ies {one of the ''Five Towns" 
frequently appearing in his writings) on 27th 
May 1867. He was educated at the endowed Mid- 
dle School, Newcastle-under-Lyme, and matriculated 
in the London University. From school he went 
into the office of his father, who practised as a 
solicitor at Hanky, and stayed with him until 
1889, when he took a post in a solicitor's office 
in London, which he held until 1893. In that 
year he abandoned the law finally to become assistant 
editor of Woman, and succeeded to the editorship in 
1896. This post he resigned in 1900 to devote him- 
self exclusively to literature. In the meantime several 
of his works had been issued, the first being "A Man 
from the North" (1898) and a handbook, "Journal- 
ism for Women," followed in the next year by the 
publication of a volume of plays, "Polite Farces," his 
first experiments in drama. Afterwards appeared in 
rapid succession nine other novels, two volumes of 
short stories, seven volumes of belles-lettres, and seven 
fantasias. Besides these he wrote two plays, "Cupid 
and Common-Sense," produced by the Stage Society 
in 1908, and "What the Public Wants," also pro- 
duced by the Stage Society in 1909, and afterwards 
by Mr. Hawtrey at the New Royalty Theatre. Both 

[V] 



these plays were subsequently staged in Glasgow, and 
by Miss Horniman's Company. The most important 
of his publications include:— among novels/' Leonora," 
"A Great Man," " Sacred and Prof ane Love," ''Whom 

God Hath Joined ," " The Old Wives' Tale," and 

" Clayhanger" ; among the belles-lettres, " The Truth 
about an Author," "Literary Taste," " The Reason- 
able Life," " The Human Machine," and "How to 
Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day" {the last four 
contributed originally to T. P.'s Weekly, and contain- 
ing indications of Mr. Bennett's theories of life); and 
in the short stories, "Tales of the Five Towns," and 
" The Grim Smile of the Five Towns." Mr. Bennett 
has very definite leanings towards Socialism, and, 
under a pseudonym, writes regularly for The New 
Age. He also contributes from time to time to the 
most important progressive weekly and monthly 

magazines. 

F. C. B. 



[vi] 



The Arnold Bennett Calendar 



yanuary 



One 

The individual who scoffs at New Year's 
resolutions resembles the woman who 
says she doesn't look under the bed at 
nights; the truth is not in him. 

Two 

To give pleasure is the highest end of 
any work of art, because the pleasure 
procured from any art is tonic, and 
transforms the life into which it enters. 

Three 

There are only two fundamental differ- 
ences in the world — the difference be- 
tween sex and sex, and the difference 
between youth and age. 

Four 

The only class of modern play in which 
it is possible to be both quite artistic 
and quite marketable, is the farce. 

[9] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Five 

To enjoy a work of imagination is no 
pastime, rather a sweet but fatiguing 
labour. After a play of Shakespeare or 
a Wagnerian opera repose is needed. 
Only a madman like Louis of Bavaria 
could demand Tristan twice in one 
night. 

iS i X 

Great books do not spring from some- 
thing accidental in the great men who 
wrote them. They are the effluence of 
their very core, the expression of the life 
itself of the authors. 

Seven 

It is within the experience of everyone 
that when pleasure and pain reach a 
certain intensity they are indistinguis]^ 
able. 

Eight 

One of the main obstacles to the culti- 
vation of poetry in the average sensible 
man is an absurdly inflated notion of 
the ridiculous. 

[10] 



JANUARY 



Nine 

The crudest excitement of the imagina- 
tive faculty is to be preferred to a swinish 
preoccupation with the gross physical 
existence. 

Ten 

The brain is the diplomatist which ar- 
ranges relations between our instinctive 
self and the universe, and it fulfils its 
mission when it provides for the maxi- 
mum of freedom to the instincts with 
the minimum of friction. 

Eleven 

A woman who has beauty wants to 
frame it in beauty. The eye is a sen- 
sualist, and its appetites, once aroused, 
grow. A beautiful woman takes the 
same pleasure in the sight of another 
beautiful woman as a man does; only 
jealousy or fear prevents her from ad- 
mitting the pleasure. 

Twelve 

The beginning of wise living lies in the 
control of the brain by the will. 

[11] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Thirteen 

To utter a jeremiad upon the decadence 
of taste, to declare that literature is 
going to the dogs because a fourth-rate 
novel has been called a masterpiece and 
has made someone's fortune, would be 
absurd. I have a strong faith that taste 
is as good as ever it was, and that litera- 
ture will continue on its way undisturbed. 

Fourteen 

There is a loveliness of so imperious, ab- 
solute, dazzling a kind that it banishes 
from the hearts of men all moral con- 
ceptions, all considerations of right and 
wrong, and leaves therein nothing but 
worship and desire. 

Fifteen 

When homage is reiterated, when the 
pleasure of obeying a command and 
satisfying a caprice is begged for, when 
roses are strewn, and even necks put 
down in the path, one forgets to be 
humble; one forgets that in meekness 
alone lies the sole good; one confuses 
deserts with the hazards of heredity. 

[12] 



JANUARY 



Sixteen 

There are men who are capable of loving 
a machine more deeply than they can 
love a woman. They are among the 
happiest men on earth. 

Seventeen 

The uncultivated reader is content to 
live wholly in and for the moment, 
sentence by sentence. Keep him amused 
and he will ask no more. You may de- 
lude him, you may withhold from him 
every single thing to which he is right- 
fully entitled, but he will not care. The 
more crude you are, the better will he 
be pleased. 

Eighteen 

It is only in the stress of fine ideas and 
emotions that a man may be truly said 
to live. 

Nineteen 

Oh, innocence! Oh, divine ignorance! Oh, 
refusal! None knows your value save 
her who has bartered you! And herein 
is the woman's tragedy. 

[13] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty 

To extract from the brain, at will and 
by will, concentration on a given idea 
for even so short a period as half an hour 
is an exceedingly difficult feat — and 
a fatiguing! It needs perseverance. 

T w e nt y-o n e 

A merely literary crudity will affect the 
large public neither one way nor the 
other, since the large public is entirely 
uninterested in questions of style; but 
all other crudities appeal strongly to 
that public. 

T w en ty-t wo 

^^ Cupid and Commons ense'' produced. 
Everyone who has driven a motorcar knows 
the uncanny sensation that ensues 
when for the first time in your life 
you engage the clutch, and the Thing 
beneath you begins mysteriously and 
formidably to move. It is at once an 
astonishment, a terror, and a delight. 
I felt Uke that as I watched the progress 
of my first play. 

[14] 



JANUARY 



T w en ty-thr e e 

Can you see the sun over the viaduct at 
Loughborough Junction of a morning, 
and catch its rays in the Thames off 
Dewar's whisky monument, and not 
shake with the joy of Hfe? If so, you 
and Shakespeare are not yet in com- 
munication. 

Twenty-four 

Adults have never yet invented any in- 
stitution, festival or diversion spe- 
cially for the benefit of children. The 
egoism of adults makes such an effort 
impossible, and the ingenuity and pli- 
ancy of children make it unnecessary. 
The pantomime, for example, which is 
now pre-eminently a diversion for chil- 
dren, was created by adults for the 
amusement of adults. Children have 
merely accepted it and appropriated it. 
Children, being helpless, are of course 
fatalists and imitators. They take what 
comes, and they do the best they can 
with it. And when they have made 
something their own that was adult, 
they stick to it like leeches. 

[15] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty-five 

The living speak of the uncanniness of the 
dead. It does not occur to them that 
manifestations of human existence may 
be uncanny to the dead. 

Twenty-six 

There is no royal road to the control of 
the brain. There is no patent dodge 
about it, and no complicated function 
which a plain person may not compre- 
hend. It is simply a question of: "I 
will, / will, and I will.'' 

T wen t y-sev en 

I knew that when love lasted, the credit 
of the survival was due far more often 
to the woman than to the man. The 
woman must husband herself, dole herself 
out, economise herself so that she might 
be splendidly wasteful when need was. 
The woman must plan, scheme, devise, 
invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; 
and do all this sincerely and lovingly in 
the name and honour of love. A passion 
for her is a campaign ; and her deadliest 
enemy is satiety. 

[16] 



JANUARY 



Twenty-eight 

Efficient living, living up to one's best 
standard, getting the last ounce of power 
out of the machine with the minimum 
of friction: these things depend on the 
disciplined and vigorous condition of the 
brain. 

T w enty-n ine 

In the world of books, as in every other 
world, one-half does not know how the 
other half lives. In literary matters the 
literate seldom suspect the extreme sim- 
plicity and naivete of the ilhterate. They 
wilfully blind themselves to it; they are 
afraid to face it. 



Thirty 

The mysteriousness of woman vanishes 
the instant you brutally face it. Boys 
and ageing celibates are obsessed by the 
mysteriousness of woman. The obses- 
sion is a sign either of immaturity or 
of morbidity. The mysteriousness of 
woman, — take her, and see then if she 
is mysterious! 

[17] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Thirty-one 

Train journeys have too often been sor- 
rowful for me, so much so that the con- 
ception itself of a train, crawling over 
the country like a snake, or flying across 
it like a winged monster, fills me with 
melancholy. Trains loaded with human 
parcels of sadness and illusion and brief 
joy, wandering about, crossing, and 
occasionally colliding in the murk of 
existence; trains warmed and lighted in 
winter; trains open to catch the air of 
your own passage in summer; night- 
trains that pierce the night with your 
yellow, glaring eyes, and waken mysteri- 
ous villages, and leave the night behind 
and run into the dawn as into a station; 
trains that carry bread and meats for 
the human parcels, and pillows and 
fountains of fresh water; trains that 
sweep haughtily and wearily indifferent 
through the landscapes and the towns, 
sufficient unto yourselves, hasty, pant- 
ing, formidable, and yet mournful en- 
tities: I have understood you in your 
arrogance and your pathos! 



1181 



February 



One 

The ecstasy of longing is better than 
the assuaging of desire. 

Two 

As regards facts and ideas, the great 
mistake made by the average well-inten- 
tioned reader is that he is content with 
the names of things instead of occupying 
himself with the causes of things. 

Three 

Time and increasing knowledge of the 
true facts have dissipated for me the 
melancholy and affecting legend of liter- 
ary talent going a-begging because of 
the indifference of publishers. young 
author of talent, would that I could fmd 
you and make you understand how the 
publisher yearns for you as the lover for 
his love. 

[19] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Four 

The brain can be disciplined by learning 
the habit of obedience. And it can learn 
the habit of obedience by the practice 
of concentration. 

Five 

You can attach any ideas you please to 
music, but music, if you will forgive me 
saying so, rejects them all equally. Art 
has to do with emotions not with ideas, 
and the great defect of literature is that 
it can only express emotions by means 
of ideas. What makes music the great- 
est of all the arts is that it can express 
emotions without ideas. Literature can 
appeal to the soul only through the mind. 
Music goes direct. Its language is a 
language which the soul alone under- 
stands, but which the soul can never 
translate. 

S i X 

If a man does not spend at least as much 
time in actively and definitely thinking 
about what he has read as he spent in 
reading, he is simply insulting his author. 

[20] 



FEBRUARY 



Seven 

He was of that small and lonely minority 
of men who never know ambition, ardour, 
zeal, yearning, tears; whose convenient 
desires are capable of immediate satis- 
faction; of whom it may be said that 
they purchase a second-rate happiness 
cheap at the price of an incapacity for 
deep feeling. 

Eight 

No man, except a greater author, can teach 
an author his business. 

Nine 

Size is the quality which most strongly 
and surely appeals to the imagination of 
the multitude. Of all modern monu- 
ments the Eiffel Tower and the Big 
Wheel have aroused the most genuine 
curiosity and admiration: they are the 
biggest. As with this monstrous archi- 
tecture of metals, so with the fabric of 
ideas and emotions: the attention of the 
whole crowd can only be caught by an 
audacious hugeness, an eye-smiting enor- 
mity of dimensions so gross as to be 
nearly physical. 

[21] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Ten 

Genius apart, woman is usually more touch- 
ingly lyrical than man in the yearning 
for the ideal. 

Eleven 

I had fast in my heart's keeping the new 
truth that in the body, and the instincts 
of the body, there should be no shame 
but rather a frank, joyous pride. 

Twelve 

A person is idle because his thoughts 
dwell habitually on the instant pleasures 
of idleness. 

Thirteen 

By love I mean a noble and sensuous 
passion, absorbing the energies of the 
soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all 
that has gone before it to the level of a 
mere prelude. 

Fourteen 

For myself, I have never valued work for 
its own sake, and I never shall. 

[22] 



FEBRUARY 



Fifteen 

Having once decided to achieve a certain 
task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and 
distaste. The gain in self-confidence of 
having accomplished a tiresome labour 
is immense. 

Sixteen 

All who look into their experience will 
admit that the failure to replace old 
habits by new ones is due to the fact 
that at the critical moment the brain 
does not remember; it simply forgets. 

Seventeen 

Many writers, and many clever writers, 
use the art of literature merely to gain 
an end which is connected with some 
different art, or with no art. Such a 
writer, finding himself burdened with a 
message prophetic, didactic, or reform- 
ing, discovers suddenly that he has the 
imaginative gift, and makes his imag- 
ination the servant of his intellect, 
or of emotions which are not artistic 
emotions. 

[23] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Eighteen 

I only value mental work for the more 
full and more intense consciousness of 
being alive which it gives me. 

Nineteen 

Whatever the vagaries of human nature, 
the true philosopher is never surprised 
by them. And one vagary is not more 
strange than another. 

Twenty 

You can control nothing but your own 
mind. Even your two-year-old babe 
may defy you by the instinctive force of 
its personality. 

Twenty-one 

To take the common grey things which 
people know and despise, and, without 
tampering, to disclose their epic signifi- 
cance, their essential grandeur — that is 
realism as distinguished from idealism 
or romanticism. It may scarcely be, it 
probably is not, the greatest art of all; 
but it is art precious and indisputable. 

[24] 



FEBRUARY 



T w ent y 'two 

There are few mental exercises better than 
learning great poetry or prose by heart. 

Twenty -three 

The British pubhc will never be con- 
vinced by argument. But two drops of 
perspiration on the cheeks of a nice- 
looking girl with a torn skirt and a 
crushed hat will make it tremble for the 
safety of its ideals, and twenty drops 
will persuade it to sign anything for 
the restoration of decency. You surely 
don't suppose that argument will be of 
any use! 

T w ent y -fo u r 

Some people have a gift of conjuring 
with conversations. They are almost 
always frankly and openly interested 
in themselves. You may seek to foil 
them; you may even violently wrench 
the conversation into other directions. 
But every effort will be useless. They 
will beat you. You had much better 
lean back in your chair and enjoy their 
legerdemain. 

[25] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



T w e nt y -f iv e 

The voice of this spirit says that it has 
lost every illusion about life, and that 
life seems only the more beautiful. It 
says that activity is but another form of 
contemplation, pain but another form 
of pleasure, power but another form of 
weakness, hate but another form of love, 
and that it is well these things should 
be so. It says there is no end, only a 
means; and that the highest joy is to 
suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to 
exist. If you will but live, it cries, that 
grave but yet passionate voice — if you 
will but live! Were there a heaven, and 
you reached it, you could do no more 
than live. The true heaven is here 
where you live, where you strive and 
lose, and weep and laugh. And the true 
hell is here, where you forget to live, and 
blind your eyes to the omnipresent and 
terrible beauty of existence. 

Twenty-six 

The most important preliminary to self- 
development is the faculty of concen- 
trating at will. 

126] 



FEBRUARY 



Twenty-seven 

Diaries, save in experienced hands, are apt 
to get themselves done with the very 
minimum of mental effort. They also 
tend to an exaggeration of egotism, and 
if they are left lying about they tend to 
strife. 

Twenty-eight 

The English world of home is one of 
the most perfectly organized microcosms 
on this planet, not excepting the Indian 
purdah. The product of centuries of 
culture, it is regarded, not too absurdly, 
as the fairest flower of Christian civilisa- 
tion. It exists chiefly, of course, for 
women, but it could never have been 
what it is had not men bound themselves 
to respect the code which they made for 
it. It is the fountain of refinement and 
of consolation, the nursery of affection. 
It has the peculiar faculty of nourishing 
itself, for it implicity denies the existence 
of anything beyond its doorstep, save the 
constitution, a bishop, a rector, the sea- 
side, Switzerland, and the respectful 
poor. 

[271 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



T went y -n ine 

have always been a bookman. From 
adolescence books have been one of my 
passions. Books not merely — and per- 
haps not chiefly — as vehicles of learning 
or knowledge, but books as books, books 
as entities, books as beautiful things, 
books as historical antiquities, books as 
repositories of memorable associations. 
Questions of type, ink, paper, margins, 
watermarks, paginations, bindings, are 
capable of really agitating me. 



[281 



March 



One 

It is characteristic of the literary artist 
with a genuine vocation that his large 
desire is, not to express in words any 
particular thing, but to express himself, 
the sum of his sensations. He feels the 
vague, disturbing impulse to write long 
before he has chosen his first subject 
from the thousands of subjects which 
present themselves, and which in the 
future he is destined to attack. 

• Two 

In the mental world what counts is not 
numbers but co-ordination. 

Three 

In England, nearly all the most interesting 
people are social reformers: and the 
only circles of society in which you are 
not bored, in which there is real con- 
versation, are the circles of social reform. 

[29] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Four 

Anthology construction is one of the pleas- 
antest hobbies that a person who is 
not mad about golf and bridge — that is 
to say, a thinking person — can possibly 
have. 

Five 

That part of my life which I conduct 
by myself, without reference — or at 
any rate without direct reference — to 
others, I can usually manage in such a 
way that the gods do not positively 
weep at the spectacle thereof. 

5 / X 

It's quite impossible to believe that a 
man is a genius, if you've been to school 
with him, or even known his father. 

Seven 

It is the privilege of only the greatest 
painters not to put letters on the corners 
of their pictures in order to keep other 
painters from taking the credit for them 
afterwards. 

[30] 



MARCH 



Eight 

Your own mind has the power to trans- 
mute every external phenomenon to its 
own purposes. 

Nine 

Anything would be a success in London 
on Sunday night. People are so grateful. 

Ten 

The one cheerful item in a universe of 
stony facts is that no one can harm any- 
body except himself. 

Eleven 

The eye that has learned to look life 
full in the face without a quiver of the 
lid should find nothing repulsive. Every- 
thing that is, is the ordered and calculable 
result of environment. Nothing can be 
abhorrent, nothing blameworthy, noth- 
ing contrary to nature. Can we exceed 
nature? In the presence of the primeval 
and ever-continuing forces of nature, 
can we maintain our fantastic concep- 
tions of sin and of justice? We are, and 
that is all we should dare to say. 

[311 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twelve 

The art of life, the art of extracting all 
its power from the human machine, does 
not lie chiefly in processes of bookish- 
culture, nor in contemplations of the 
beauty and majesty of existence. It 
lies chiefly in keeping the peace, the 
whole peace, and nothing but the peace, 
with those with whom one is "thrown." 

Thirteen 

We have our ideals now, but when they 
are mentioned we feel self-conscious and 
uncomfortable, like a school-boy caught 
praying. 

Fourteen 

After the crest of the wave the trough — 
it must be so; but how profound the 
instinct which complains! 

Fifteen 

The performance of some pianists is so 
wonderful that it seems as if they were 
crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and 
you tremble lest they should fall off. 

[32] 



MARCH 

Sixteen 

The secret of calm cheerfulness is kindli- 
ness; no person can be consistently 
cheerful and calm who does not con- 
sistently think kind thoughts. 

Seventeen 

It is indubitable that a large amount of 
what is known as self-improvement is 
simply self-indulgence — a form of 
pleasure which only incidentally im- 
proves a particular part of the human 
machine, and even that part to the neg- 
lect of far more important parts. 

Eighteen 

The average man has this in common 
with the most exceptional genius, that 
his career in its main contours is governed 
by his instincts. 

Nineteen 

The most beautiful things, and the most 
vital things, and the most lasting things 
are often mysterious and inexplicable 
and sudden. 

[33] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty 

An accurate knowledge of any subject, 
coupled with a carefully nurtured 
sense of the relativity of that subject 
to other subjects, implies an enormous 
self -development. 

T w enty '0 ne 

The great artist may force you to laugh, 
or to wipe away a tear, but he accom- 
plishes these minor feats by the way. 
What he mainly does is to see for you. 
If, in presenting a scene, he does not 
disclose aspects of it which you would 
not have observed for yourself, then he 
falls short of success. In a physical and 
psychical sense power is visual, the 
power of an eye seeing things always 
afresh, virginally as though on the very 
morn of creation. 

T w enty 'two 

It is well, when one is judging a friend, 
to remember that he is judging you 
with the same god-like and superior 
impartiality. 

1341 



MARCH 

Twenty-three 

He who speaks, speaks twice. His words 
convey his thoughts, and his tone con- 
veys his mental attitude towards the 
person spoken to. 

T w en ty 'f u r 

The man who loses his temper often 
thinks he is doing something rather fine 
and majestic. On the contrary, so far 
is this from being the fact, he is merely 
making an ass of himself. 

T w ent y -f iv e 

The female sex is prone to be inaccurate 
and careless of apparently trivial detail, 
because this is the general tendency of 
mankind. In men destined for a busi- 
ness or a profession, the proclivity is 
harshly discouraged at an early stage. 
In women, who usually are not destined 
for anything whatever, it enjoys a merry 
life, and often refuses to be improved 
out of existence when the sudden need 
arises. No one by taking thought can 
deracinate the mental habits of, say, 
twenty years. 

135] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty-six 

Kindliness of heart is not the greatest of 
human qualities — and its general effect 
on the progress of the world is not en- 
tirely beneficent — but it is the greatest 
of human qualities in friendship. 

T we nt y - s ev en 

There is a certain satisfaction in hope- 
lessness amid the extreme of misery. 
You press it to you as the martyr 
clutched the burning fagot. You en- 
joy it. You savour, piquantly, your woe, 
your shame, your abjectness, the failure 
of your philosophy. You celebrate the 
perdition of the man in you. You want 
to talk about it brazenly; even to ex- 
aggerate it, and to swagger over it. 

Twenty-eight 

The great public is no fool. It is huge 
and simple and slow in mental processes, 
like a good-humoured giant, easy to 
please and grateful for diversion. But 
it has a keen sense of its own dignity; 
it will not be trifled with; it resents for 
ever the tongue in the cheek. 

[361 



MAR CH 

Twenty-nine 

The beauty of horses, timid creatures, 
sensitive and graceful and irrational as 
young girls, is a thing apart; and what 
is strange is that their vast strength 
does not seem incongruous with it. To 
be above that proud and lovely organism, 
listening, apprehensive, palpitating, nerv- 
ous far beyond the human, to feel one's 
self almost part of it by intimate contact, 
to yield to it, and make it yield, to draw 
from it into one's self some of its exultant 
vitality — in a word, to ride — I can 
comprehend a fme enthusiasm for that. 

Thirty 

The respectable portion of the male sex 
in England may be divided into two 
classes, according to its method and 
manner of complete immersion in water. 
One class, the more dashing, dashes into 
a cold tub every morning. Another, the 
more cleanly, sedately takes a warm bath 
every Saturday night. There can be no 
doubt that the former class lends tone 
and distinction to the country, but the 
latter is the nation's backbone. 

[37] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Thirty-one 

Although you may easily practise upon 
the credulity of a child in matters of 
fact, you cannot cheat his moral and 
social judgment. He will add you up, 
and he will add anybody up, and he will 
estimate conduct, upon principles of 
his own and in a manner terribly im- 
partial. Parents have no sterner nor 
more discerning critics than their own 
children. 



[381 



April 



One 

A person's character is, and can be, 
nothing else but the total result of his 
habits of thought. 

Two 

Beware of hope, and beware of ambition! 
Each is excellently tonic, like German 
competition, in moderation, but all of 
you are suffering from self-indulgence in 
the first, and very many of you are ruin- 
ing your constitutions with the second. 

Three 

As a matter of fact, people "indulge" in 
remorse; it is a somewhat vicious form 
of spiritual pleasure. 

Four 

When a thing is thoroughly well done it 
often has the air of being a miracle. 

[39] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Five 

After all the shattering discoveries of 
science and conclusions of philosophy, 
mankind has still to live with dignity 
amid hostile nature, and in the presence 
of an unknowable power, and mankind 
can only succeed in this tremendous feat 
by the exercise of faith and of that 
mutual goodwill which is based in sin- 
cerity and charity. 

5 ix 

All the days that are to come will more 
or less resemble the present day, until 
you die. 

Seven 

In literature, when nine hundred and 
ninety-nine souls ignore you, but the 
thousandth buys your work, or at least 
borrows it — that is called enormous 
popularity. 

Eight 

If life is not a continual denial of the 
past, then it is nothing. 

[40] 



APRIL 



Nine 



The profoundest belief of the average 
man is that virtue ought never to be its 
own reward. Shake that beUef and you 
commit a cardinal sin; you disturb his 
mental quietude. 

Ten 

It is notorious that the smaller the com- 
munity, and the more completely it 
is self-contained, the deeper will be its 
preoccupation with its own trifling 
affairs. 

Eleven 

To my mind, most societies with a moral 
aim are merely clumsy machines for 
doing simple jobs with the maximum of 
friction, expense and inefTiciency. I 
should define the majority of these soci- 
eties as a group of persons each of whom 
expects the others to do something very 
wonderful. 

Twelve 

There is nothing like a sleepless couch 
for a clear vision of one's environment. 

141] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Thirteen 

The supreme muddlers of living are often 
people of quite remarkable intellectual 
faculty, with a quite remarkable gift of 
being wise for others. 

Fourteen 

Our leading advertisers have richly proved 
that the public will believe anything if 
they are told of it often enough. 

Fifteen 

Here's a secret. No writer likes writing, 
at least not one in a hundred, and the 
exception, ten to one, is a howling medio- 
crity. That's a fact. But all the same, 
they're miserable if they don't write. 

Sixteen 

The first and noblest aim of imaginative 
literature is not either to tickle or to 
stab the sensibilities, but to render a 
coherent view of life's apparent inco- 
herence, to give shape to the amorphous, 
to discover beauty which was hidden, to 
reveal essential truth. 

[421 



APRIL 

Seventeen 

There is a theory that a great public can 
appreciate a great novel, that the highest 
modern expression of literary art need not 
appeal in vain to the average reader. 
And I believe this to be true — provided 
that such a novel is written with intent, 
and with a full knowledge of the peculiar 
conditions to be satisfied; I believe that 
a novel could be written which would 
unite in a mild ecstasy of praise the two 
extremes — the most inclusive majority 
and the most exclusive minority. 

Eighteen 

"Give us more brains, Lord!" ejaculated 
a great writer. Personally, I think he 
would have been wiser if he had asked 
first for the power to keep in order such 
brains as we have. 

Nineteen 

Under the incentive of a woman's eyes, 
of what tremendous efforts is a clever 
man not capable, and, deprived of it, to 
what depths of stagnation will he not 
descend! 

1431 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty 

Elegance is a form of beauty. It not 
only enhances beauty, but it is the one 
thing which will console the eye for the 
absence of beauty. 

Twenty-one 

There are several ways of entering upon 
journalism. One is at once to found or 
purchase a paper, and thus achieve the 
editorial chair at a single step. This 
course is often adopted in novels, some- 
times with the happiest results; and 
much less often in real life, where the 
end is invariably and inevitably painful. 

T w eniy -two 

Existence rightly considered is a fair compro- 
mise between two instincts — the instinct 
of hoping one day to live, and the instinct 
to live here and now. 

T wenty -t hr ee 

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into 
which nothing harmful can enter except 
by your permission. 

[441 



APRIL 

T w en t y 'fo u r 

The average man is not half enough of 
an egotist. If egotism means a terrific 
interest in one's self, egotism is absolutely 
essential to efTicient living. 

T w e nt y -f iv e 

Events have no significance except by virtue 
of the ideas from which they spring; the 
clash of events is the clash of ideas, and 
out of this clash the moral lesson inevi- 
tably emerges, whether we ask for it or 
no. Hence every great book is a great 
moral book, and there is a true and fine 
sense in which the average reader is jus- 
tified in regarding art as the handmaid 
of morality. 

T went y -s ix 

William Shakespeare's Birthday 
Shakespeare is "taught" in schools; that is 
to say, the Board of Education and all 
authorities pedagogic bind themselves 
together in a determined effort to make 
every boy in the land a lifelong enemy 
of Shakespeare. It is a mercy they don't 
"teach" Blake. 

[45] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty-seven 

Herbert Spencer's Birthday 
There are those who assert that Spencer 
was not a supreme genius ! At any rate he 
taught me intellectual courage ; he taught 
me that nothing is sacred that will not 
bear inspection; and I adore his memory. 

Twenty-eight 

Unite the colossal with the gaudy, and 
you will not achieve the sublime; but, 
unless you are deterred by humility and 
a sense of humour, you may persuade 
yourself that you have done so, and 
certainly most people will credit you 
with the genuine feat. 

Twenty-nine 

The average reader (like Goethe and Ste. 
Beuve) has his worse and his better 
self, and there are times when he will 
yield to the former; but on the whole his 
impulses are good. In every writer who 
earns his respect and enduring love there 
is some central righteousness, which is 
capable of being traced and explained, 
and at which it is impossible to sneer. 

[461 



APRIL 

Thirty 

Literature is the art of using words. This 
is not a platitude, but a truth of the 
first importance, a truth so profound 
that many writers never get down to it, 
and so subtle that many other writers 
who think they see it never in fact 
really comprehend it. The business of 
the author is with words. The practisers 
of other arts, such as music and paint- 
ing, deal with ideas and emotions, but 
only the author has to deal with them by 
means of words. Words are his exclusive 
possession among creative artists and 
craftsmen. They are his raw material, 
his tools and instruments, his manu- 
factured product, his alpha and omega. 
He may abound in ideas and emotions 
of the finest kind, but those ideas and 
emotions cannot be said to have an 
effective existence until they are ex- 
pressed; they are limited to the extent 
of their expression; and their expression 
is limited to the extent of the author's 
skill in the use of words. I smile when 
I hear people say, "If I could write, if 
I could only put down what I feel — !" 



[471 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Such people beg the whole question. The 
abiUty to write is the sole thing pecuhar 
to literature — not the ability to think 
nor the ability to feel, but the abihty 
to write, to utilise words. 



[481 



Maj 



One 

Only a small minority of authors overwrite 
themselves. Most of the good and the 
tolerable ones do not write enough. 

Two 

The entire business of success is a gigantic 
tacit conspiracy on the part of the minor- 
ity to deceive the majority. 

Three 

There are at least three women-journalists 
in Europe to-day whose influence is 
felt in Cabinets and places where they 
govern (proving that sex is not a bar 
to the proper understanding of la haute 
politique)', whereas the man who dares 
to write on fashions does not exist. 

Four 
Habits are the very dickens to change. 

[491 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Five 

Not only is art a factor in life; it is a 
factor in all lives. The division of the 
world into two classes, one of which has 
a monopoly of what is called "artistic 
feeling," is arbitrary and false. Every- 
one is an artist, more or less; that is to 
say, there is no person quite without that 
faculty of poetising, which, by seeing 
beauty, creates beauty, and which, when 
it is sufficiently powerful and articulate, 
constitutes the musical composer, the 
architect, the imaginative writer, the 
sculptor, and the painter. 

Six 

Is it nothing to you to learn to understand 
that the world is not a dull place? 

Seven 

In neither faith nor enthusiasm can a 
child compete with a convinced adult. 
No child could believe in anything as 
passionately as the modern millionaire 
believes in money, or as the modern 
social reformer believes in the virtue of 
Acts of Parliament. 

[50] 



MAY 

Eight 

Literature, instead of being an accessory, is 
the fundamental sine qua non of complete 
living. 

Nine 

No novelist, however ingenious, who does 
not write what he feels, and what, by its 
careful finish, approximately pleases him- 
self, can continue to satisfy the average 
reader. He may hang for years preca- 
riously on the skirts of popularity, but in 
the end he will fall; he will be found out. 

Ten 

Only the fool and the very young expect 
happiness. The wise merely hope to be 
interested, at least not to be bored, in 
their passage through this world. Noth- 
ing is so interesting as love and grief, 
and the one involves the other. 

Eleven 

One of the commonest characteristics of 
the successful man is his idleness, his 
immense capacity for wasting time. 

[511 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twelve 

People who regard literary taste simply 
as an accomplishment, and literature 
simply as a distraction, will never truly 
succeed, either in acquiring the accom- 
plishment or in using it half-acquired as 
a distraction. 

Thirteen 

The finest souls have their reactions, their 
rebellions against wise reason. 

Fourteen 

My theory is that politeness, instead of 
decreasing with intimacy — should in- 
crease! And when I say "Politeness" 
I mean common, superficial politeness. 
I don't mean the deep-down sort of 
. thing that you can only detect with a 
divining-rod. 

Fifteen 

Marcus Aurelius is assuredly regarded as 
the greatest of writers in the human 
machine school, and not to read him 
daily is considered by many to be a 
bad habit. 

[52] 



MAY 

Sixteen 

Part of the secret of Balzac's unique power 
over the reader is the unique tendency 
of his own interest in the thing to be told. 

Seventeen 

*'Anna of the Five Towns" finished 1901 
The art of fiction is the art of telling a 
story. This statement is not so obvious 
and unnecessary as it may seem. Most 
beginners and many "practised hands" 
attend to all kinds of things before they 
attend to the story. With them the 
art of fiction is the art of describing 
character or landscape, of getting "at- 
mosphere," and of being humorous, pa- 
thetic, flippant, or terrifying; while the 
story is a perfunctory excuse for these 
feats. They are so busy with the tradi- 
tional paraphernalia of fiction, with the 
tricks of the craft, that what should 
be the principal business is reduced to 
a subsidiary task. They forget that 
character, landscape, atmosphere, hu- 
mour, pathos, etc., are not ends in 
themselves, but only means toward an 
end. 

[53] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Eighteen 

How true it is that the human soul is 
solitary, that content is the only true 
riches, and that to be happy we must be 
good. 

Nineteen 

Men of letters who happen to have genius 
do not write for men of letters. They 
write, as Wagner was proud to say he 
composed, for the ordinary person. 

Twenty 

Great success never depends on the practice 
of the humbler virtues, though it may 
occasionally depend on the practice of 
the prouder vices. 

T went y -one 

"I've been to the National Gallery twice, 
and, upon my word, I was almost the 
only person there! And it's free, too! 
People don't want picture-galleries. If 
they did, they'd go. Who ever saw a 
public-house empty, or Peter Robinson's? 
And you have to pay there!" 

[54] 



MAY 

T w e nty 'two 

He who has not been "presented to the 
freedom" of hterature has not wakened 
up out of his prenatal sleep. He is 
merely not born. He can't see; he 
can't hear; he can't feel in any full 
sense. He can only eat his dinner. 

Twenty -three 

All the arts are a conventionalisation, an 
ordering of nature. 

Twenty -Jo u r 

The aim of literary study is not to amuse 
the hours of leisure; it is to awake one- 
self, it is to be alive, to intensify one's 
capacity for pleasure, for sympathy, 
and for comprehension. 

T w e nt y -f ive 

Like every aging artist of genuine ac- 
complishment, he knew — none better 
— that there is no satisfaction save the 
satisfaction of fatigue after honest en- 
deavour. He knew — none better — 
that wealth and glory and fine clothes 
are naught, and that striving is all. 

[55] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty-six 

Prepare to live by all means, but for 
Heaven's sake do not forget to live. 

T wenty -seven 

My Birthday 
Sometimes I suddenly halt and address 
myself: "You may be richer or you may 
be poorer; you may live in greater pomp 
and luxury, or in less. The point is, that 
you will always be, essentially, what you 
are now. You have no real satisfaction 
to look forward to except the satisfac- 
tion of continually inventing, fancying, 
imagining, scribbling. Say another 
thirty years of these emotional inge- 
nuities, these interminable variations 
on the theme of beauty. Is it good 
enough?" And I answered: "Yes." 
But who knows? Who can preclude 
the regrets of the dying couch? 

Twenty-eight 

The balanced sanity of a great mind makes 
impossible exaggeration, and, therefore, 
distortion. 

[561 



MAY 

T w e nt y - n i ne 

No art that is not planned in form is 
worth consideration, and no life that is 
not planned in convention can ever be 
satisfactory. 

Thirty 

The value of restraint is seldom inculcated 
upon women. Indeed, its opposites — 
gush and a tendency to hysteria — are 
regarded, in many respectable quarters, 
as among the proper attributes of true 
womanliness; attributes to be artisti- 
cally cultivated. 

Thirty-one 

There grows in the North Country a cer- 
tain kind of youth of whom it may be 
said that he is born to be a Londoner. 
The metropolis, and everything that 
appertains to it, that comes down from 
it, that goes up into it, has for him 
an imperious fascination. Long before 
schooldays are over he learns to take a 
doleful pleasure in watching the exit 
of the London train from the railway 

157] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



station. He stands by the hot engine 
and envies the very stoker. Gazing 
curiously into the carriages he wonders 
that men and women, who in a few 
hours will be treading streets called 
Piccadilly and the Strand, can con- 
template the immediate future with so 
much apparent calmness; some of them 
even have the audacity to look bored. 
He finds it difficult to keep from throw- 
ing himself in the guard's van as it glides 
past him; and not until the last coach 
is a speck upon the distance does he turn 
away and, nodding absently to the 
ticket-clerk, who knows him well, go 
home to nurse a vague ambition and 
dream of town. 



158] 



yune 



One 

To cultivate and nourish a grievance 
when you have five hundred pounds in 
your pocket, in cash, is the most difficult 
thing in the world. 

Two 

The full beauty of an activity is never 
brought out until it is subjected to 
discipline and strict ordering and nice 
balancing. 

Three 

The unfading charm of classical music is V 
that you never tire of it. -^ 

Four 

The spirit of literature is unifying; it joins 
the candle and the star, and by the 
magic of an image shows that the beauty 
of the greater is in the less. 

[59] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Five 

If people, by merely wishing to do so, 
could regularly and seriously read, ob- 
serve, write, and use every faculty and 
sense, there would be very little mental 
inefficiency. 

Six 

Laws and rules, forms and ceremonies, 
are good in themselves, from a merely 
aesthetic point of view, apart from their 
social value and necessity. 

Seven 

Fashionable women have a manner of sit- 
ting down quite different from that of 
ordinary women. They only touch the 
back of the chair at the top. They 
don't loll but they only escape lolling 
by dint of gracefulness. It is an affair 
of curves, slants, descents, nicely calcu- 
lated. They elaborately lead your eye 
downwards over gradually increasing 
expanses, and naturally you expect to see 
their feet — and you don't see their 
feet. The thing is apt to be disturbing 
to unhabituated beholders. 

160] 



JUNE 

Eight 

There are moments in the working day 
of every novelist when he feels deeply 
that anything — road-mending, shop- 
walking, housebreaking — would be 
better than this eternal torture of the 
brain; but such moments pass. 

Nine y^ 

During a long and varied career as a 
bachelor, I have noticed that marriage 
is usually the death of politeness be- 
tween a man and a woman. I have 
noticed that the stronger the passion 
the weaker the manners. 

T en 

My sense of security amid the collisions 
of existence lies in the firm consciousness 
that just as my body is the servant of 
my mind, so is my mind the servant 
of me. 

Eleven 

The fault of the epoch is the absence of 
meditativeness. 

[61] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twelve 

People who don't want to live, people 
who would sooner hibernate than feel 
intensely, will be wise to eschew 
literature. 

Thirteen 

No one is so sure of achieving the aims 
of the literary craftsman as the man 
who has something to say and wishes 

" to say it simply and have done with it. 

Fourteen 

The mind can only be conquered by 
regular meditation, by deciding before- 
hand what direction its activity ought to 
take, and insisting that its activity take 
that direction; also by never leaving it 
idle, undirected, masterless, to play at 
random like a child in the streets after 
dark. 

Fifteen 

The enterprise of forming one's literary 
taste is an agreeable one; if it is not 
agreeable it cannot succeed. 

[62] 



JUNE 

Sixteen 

The attitude of the average decent person 
towards the classics of his own tongue 
is one of distrust — I had almost said, 
of fear. 

Seventeen 

Am I, a portion of the Infinite Force that 
existed biUions of years ago, and which 
will exist billions of years hence, going to 
allow myself to be worried by any terres- 
trial physical or mental event? I am not. 

Eighteen 

There is not a successful inexpert author 
writing to-day who would not be more 
successful — who would not be better 
esteemed and in receipt of a larger in- 
come — if he had taken the trouble to 
become expert. Skill does count; skill 
is always worth its cost in time and 
labour. 

Nineteen 

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but 
the view is from the top. 

[63] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty 

For me there is no supremacy in art. 
When fifty artists have contrived to be 
supreme, supremacy becomes impossible. 
Take a Uttle song by Grieg. It is per- 
fect, it is supreme. No one could be 
greater than Grieg was great when he 
wrote that song. The whole last act 
of The Twilight of the Gods is not greater 
than a Uttle song of Grieg's. 



Twenty-one 

We talked books. We just simply enu- 
merated books without end, praising 
or damning them, and arranged authors 
in neat pews, like cattle in classes at an 
agricultural show. No pastime is more 
agreeable to people who have the book 
disease, and none more quickly fleets 
the hours, and none is more delightfully 
futile. 

T went y -t wo 

The law of gravity is absurd and inde- 
fensible when you fall downstairs; but 
you obey it. 

[64] 



JUNE 

Twenty -three 

It is difficult to make a reputation, but 
it is even more difficult seriously to 
mar a reputation once properly made — 
so faithful is the public. 

T w ent y -fo u r 

That which has cost a sacrifice is always 
endeared. 

Twenty -five 

If literary aspirants genuinely felt that 
literature was the art of using words, 
bad, slipshod writing — writing that 
stultifies the thought and emotion which 
it is designed to render effective — would 
soon be a thing of the past. For they 
would begin at the beginning as appren- 
tices to all other arts are compelled 
to. The serious student of painting who 
began his apprenticeship by trying to 
paint a family group, would be regarded 
as a lunatic. But the literary aspirant 
who begins with a novel is precisely that 
sort of lunatic, and the fact that he 
sometimes gets himself into print does 
not in the least mitigate his lunacy. 

[65] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty-six 

In spite of all the differences which we 
have invented, mankind is a fellowship 
of brothers, overshadowed by insoluble 
and fearful mysteries, and dependent 
upon mutual goodwill and trust for the 
happiness it may hope to achieve. 

Twenty-seven 

The brain is a servant, exterior to the 
central force of the Ego. If it is out of 
control, the reason is not that it is un- 
controllable but merely that its discipline 
has been neglected. 

Twenty-eight 

I have been told by one of our greatest 
novelists that he constantly reads the 
dictionary, and that in his youth he 
read the dictionary through several 
times. I may recount the anecdote of 
Buckle, the historian of civilisation, who, 
when a certain dictionary was mentioned 
in terms of praise, said: "Yes, it is one 
of the few dictionaries I have read 
through with pleasure." 

[66] 



JUNE 

T w ent y ' n i ne 

The public may, and generally does, 
admire a great artist. But it begins 
(and sometimes ends) by admiring him 
for the wrong things. Shakespeare is 
more highly regarded for his philosophy 
than for his poetry, as the applause at 
any performance of "Hamlet" will 
prove. Balzac conquers by that un- 
tamed exuberance and those crude effects 
of melodrama which are the least valu- 
able parts of him. 

Thirty 

You cannot divide literature into two 
elements and say: This is matter and 
that style. Further, the significance 
and the worth of literature are to be 
comprehended and assessed in the same 
way as the significance and the worth 
of any other phenomenon: by the exer- 
cise of common-sense. Common-sense 
will tell you that nobody, not even a 
genius, can be simultaneously vulgar 
and distinguished, or beautiful and ugly, 
or precise and vague, or tender and 
harsh. And common-sense will there- 

[671 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



fore tell you that to try to set up vital 
contradictions between matter and style 
is absurd. If you refer literature to the 
standards of life, common-sense will at 
once decide which quality should count 
heaviest in your esteem. 



[68] 



July 



One 

When one has really something to say, 
one does not use cliches; one cannot. 



Two 

The extinguishing of desire, with an accom- 
panying indifTerence, be it high or low, 
is bad for youth. 

ThTte 

Do you suppose that if the fame of 
Shakespeare depended on the man in 
the street, it would survive a fortnight? 



Four 

Common-sense will solve any problem — 
any ! — always provided it is employed 
simultaneously with politeness. 

[69] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Five 

London is the most provincial town in 
England — invariably vulgar, reaction- 
ary, hysterical, and behind the rest of 
the country. A nice sort of place Eng- 
land would be if we in the provinces had 
to copy London. 



5 i X 

Progress is the gradual result of the un- 
ending battle between human reason 
and human instinct, in which the former 
slowly but surely wins. 



Seven 

As an athlete trains, as an acrobat pain- 
fully tumbles in private, so must the 
literary aspirant write. 



Eight 

classic is a work which gives pleasure 
to the minority which is intensely and 
permanently interested in literature. 

[70] 



JULY 



Nine 



It is said that geography makes history. 
In England, and especially in London, 
weather makes a good deal of history. 



Ten 

The one primary essential to literary taste 
is a hot interest in literature. If you 
have that, all the rest will come. 



Eleven 

In the Five Towns human nature is 
reported to be so hard that you can 
break stones on it. Yet sometimes it 
softens, and then we have one of our 
rare idylls of which we are very proud, 
while pretending not to be. The soft 
and delicate South would possibly not 
esteem highly our idylls, as such. Never- 
theless they are our idylls, idyllic for us, 
and reminding us, by certain symptoms, 
that, though we never cry, there is con- 
cealed somewhere within our bodies a 
fount of happy tears. 

[71] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twelve 
Reason is the basis of personal dignity. 



Thirteen 

It is by the passionate few that the re- 
nown of genius is kept alive from one 
generation to another. 



Fourteen 

We are all of us the same in essence; 
what separates us is merely differences 
in our respective stages of evolution. 



Fifteen 

It is well known that dignity will only 
bleed while you watch it. Avert your 
eyes and it instantly dries up. 



Sixteen 

All literature is the expression of feeling, 
of passion, of emotion, caused by a 
sensation of the interestingness of life. 

[72] 



JU L Y 



Seventeen 



Just as science is the development of 
common-sense, so is literature the de- 
velopment of common daily speech. 



Eighteen 

Every man who thinks clearly can write 
clearly, if not with grace and technical 
correctness. 



Nineteen 

It is important, if you wish ultimately to 
have a wide, catholic taste, to guard 
against the too common assumption 
that nothing modern will stand compari- 
son with the classics. 



Twenty 

In the matter of its own special activi- 
ties the brain is usually undisciplined 
and unreliable. We never know what 
it will do next. 

1731 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



T went y -0 ne 

It's the dodge of every begging-letter writer 
in England to mark his envelope "Private 
and Urgent." 



T went y 'two 

Women grow old; women cease to learn; 
but men, never. 



Twenty-three 

In literature, but in nothing else, I am 
a propagandist; I am not content to 
keep my opinion and let others keep 
theirs. To have a worthless book in my 
house (save in the way of business), to 
know that any friend is enjoying it, 
actually distresses me. That book must 
go, the pretensions of that book must be 
exposed, if I am to enjoy peace of mind. 



T w en ty-fo u r 

have often thought: If a son could look 
into a mother's heart, what an eyeopener 
he would have! 

[74] 



JULY 

Twenty-five 

When a writer expresses his individuality 
and his mood with accuracy, lucidity, 
and sincerity, and with an absence of 
ugliness, then he achieves good style. 
Style — it cannot be too clearly under- 
stood — is not a certain splendid some- 
thing which the writer adds to his 
meaning. It is in the meaning; it is 
that part of the meaning which specially 
reflects his individuality and his mood. 



Twenty-six 

Crime is simply a convenient monosyl- 
lable which we apply to what happens 
when the brain and the heart come into 
conflict and the brain is defeated. 



T w ent y -s ev en 

Reflect that, as a rule, the people whom 
you have come to esteem communicated 
themselves to you gradually, that they 
did not begin the entertainment with 
fireworks. 

[75] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty-eight 

To devise the contents of an issue, to 
plan them, to balance them; to sail 
with this wind and tack against that; 
to keep a sensitive, cool fmger on the 
faintly beating pulse of the terrible 
many-headed patron; to walk in a 
straight line through a forest black as 
midnight; to guess the riddle of the cir- 
culation-book week by week; to know 
by instinct why Smiths sent in a repeat 
order, or why Simpkins' was ten quires 
less; to keep one eye on the majestic 
march of the world, and the other on 
the vagaries of a bazaar-reporter who 
has forgotten the law of libel; these 
things, and seventy-seven others, are 
the real journalism. It is these things 
that make editors sardonic, grey, 
unapproachable. 



Twenty-nine 

will be bold enough to say that quite 
seventy per cent, of ambition is never 
realised at all, and that ninety per cent, 
of all realised ambition is fruitless. 

1761 



JULY 

Thirty 

To comply with the regulations ordained 
by English Society for the conduct of 
successful painters, he ought, first, to 
have taken the elementary precaution 
of being born in the United States. He 
ought, after having refused all interviews 
for months, to have ultimately granted 
a special one to a newspaper with the 
largest circulation. He ought to have 
returned to England, grown a mane 
and a tufted tail, and become the king 
of beasts; or at least to have made a 
speech at a banquet about the noble and 
purifying mission of art. Assuredly, he 
ought to have painted the portrait of his 
father or grandfather as an artisan to 
prove that he was not a snob. 

T hirty '0 ne 

Women enjoy a reputation for slipshod 
style. They have earned it. A long 
and intimate familiarity with the manu- 
script of hundreds of women-writers, 
renowned and otherwise, has convinced 
me that not ten per cent, of them can 
be relied upon to satisfy even the most 

[77] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



ordinary tests in spelling, grammar, and 
punctuation. I do not hesitate to say 
that if twenty of the most honoured 
and popular women-writers were asked 
to sit for an examination in these simple 
branches of learning, the general result 
(granted that a few might emerge with 
credit) would not only startle themselves, 
but would provide innocent amusement 
for the rest of mankind. 



[781 



August 



One 

My theory is that if a really big concern 
is properly organized, the boss ought to 
be absolutely independent of all routine. 
He ought to be free for anything that 
turns up unexpectedly. 



Two 

Often I have felt that: "I know enough, 
I feel enough. If my future is as long as 
my past, I shall still not be able to put 
down the tenth part of what I have 
already acquired." 



Three 

In journalism, as probably in no other 
profession, success depends wholly upon 
the loyal co-operation, the perfect relia- 
bility, of a number of people — some 
great, some small, but none irresponsible. 

179] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Four 

The significance and the worth of litera- 
ture are to be comprehended and assessed 
in the same way as the significance and 
the worth of any other phenomenon: by 
the exercise of common-sense. 



Five 

All wrong-doing is done in the sincere belief 
that it is the best thing to do. 



Six 

There is always a mental inferior handy, 
just as there is always a being more un- 
happy than we are. 



Seven 

Often have I said inwardly: "World, 
when I talk with you, dine with you, 
wrangle with you, love you, and hate 
you, I condescend." Every artist has 
said that. People call it conceit; people 
may call it what they please. 

[80] 



AUGUST 



Eight 



The artistic pleasures of an uncultivated 
mind are generally violent. 



Nine 

Literature cannot be said to have served 
its true purpose until it has been trans- 
lated into the actual life of him who 
reads. 

Ten 

When you cannot express yourself, de- 
pend upon it that you have nothing 
precise to express. 



Eleven 

Monotony, solitude, are essential to the 
full activity of the artist. Just as a horse 
is seen best when coursing alone over a 
great plain, so the fierce and callous 
egotism of the artist comes to its per- 
fection in a vast expanse of custom, 
leisure, and apparently vacuous reverie. 

[81] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twelve 

There can be no doubt that the average 
man blames much more than he praises. 
His instinct is to blame. If he is satis- 
fied he says nothing; if he is not, he most 
illogically kicks up a row. 



Thirteen 

We can no more spend all our waking 
hours in consciously striving towards 
higher things than we can dine exclu- 
sively off jam. 



Fourteen 
All spending is a matter of habit. 

Fifteen 

The views from Richmond Hill or Hind- 
head, or along Pall Mall at sunset, the 
smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and 
of kisses — these things are unaffected 
by the machinations of trusts and the 
hysteria of stock exchanges. 

[82] 



AUGUST 



Sixteen 



If there is one point common to all classics, 
it is the absence of exaggeration. 



Seventeen 

It is only people of small moral stature 
who have to stand on their dignity. 



Eighteen 

When you live two and a half miles from 
a railway you can cut a dash on an in- 
come which in London spells omnibus 
instead of cab. For myself, I have a 
profound belief in the efficacy of cutting 
a dash. 

Nineteen 

No one can write correctly without de- 
liberately and laboriously learning how 
to write correctly. On the other hand, 
everyone can learn to write correctly 
who takes sufficient trouble. Correct 
writing is a mechanical accomplishment; 
it could be acquired by a stockbroker. 

[83] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty 

An understanding appreciation of literature 
means an understanding appreciation of 
the world, and it means nothing else. 



Twenty-one 

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly 
more profitable and amusing than much 
money without ingenuity. 



T w enty 'two 

Nothing is easier than to explain an accom- 
plished fact in a nice, agreeable, conven- 
tional way. 



Twenty -three 

Literature is the art of using words. This 
is not a platitude, but a truth of the 
first importance, a truth so profound 
that many writers never get down to it, 
and so subtle that many other writers 
who think they see it never in fact really 
comprehend it. 

[84] 



AUG UST 



Twenty -fo u r 



In the choice of reading the individual 
must count; caprice must count, for 
caprice is often the truest index to the 
individuaUty. 



T w ent y -f iv e 

There is an infection in the air of London, 
a zymotic influence which is the mysteri- 
ous cause of unnaturalness, pose, affec- 
tation, artificiality, moral neuritis, and 
satiety. One loses grasp of the essentials 
in an undue preoccupation with the 
vacuities which society has invented. 
The distractions are too multiform. One 
never gets a chance to talk common- 
sense with one's soul. 



T w enty -s ix 

An early success is a snare. The inex- 
perienced author takes too much for 
granted. Conceit overcomes him. He 
regards himself with an undue serious- 
ness. He thinks that he is founded on 
granite for ever. 

[85] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty-seven 

The splendid pertinacity and ingenuity 
of the American journaUst in wringing 
copy out of any and every side of ex- 
istence cannot fail to quicken the pulse 
of those who are accustomed to the 
soberer, narrower, sleepier ways of Eng- 
lish newspapers. Fleet Street pretends 
to despise and contemn American meth- 
ods, yet a gradual Americanising of the 
English press is always taking place, 
with results on the whole admirable. 



Twenty-eight 

Stand defiantly on your own feet, and do 
not excuse yourself to yourself. 



Twenty-nine 

This is a matter of daily observation: 
that people are frantically engaged in 
attempting to get hold of things which, 
by universal experience, are hideously 
disappointing to those who have ob- 
tained possession of them. 

186] 



AUGUST 

Thirty 

It is a current impression that style is 
something apart from, something foreign 
to, matter — a beautiful robe which, once 
it is found, may be used to clothe the 
nudity of matter. Young writers wander 
forth searching for style, as one searches 
for that which is hidden. They might 
employ themselves as profitably in look- 
ing for the noses on their faces. For 
style is personal, as much a portion of 
one's self as the voice. It is within, not 
without; it needs only to be elicited, 
brought to light. 



T hirty-one 

When I had been in London a decade, 
I stood aside from myself and reviewed 
my situation with the godlike and de- 
tached impartiality of a trained artistic 
observer. And what I saw was a young 
man who pre-eminently knew his way 
about, and who was apt to be rather too 
complacent over this fact; a young man 
with some brilliance but far more shrewd- 
ness; a young man with a highly de- 

1871 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



veloped faculty for making a little go 
a long way; a young man who was 
accustomed to be listened to when he 
thought fit to speak, and who was de- 
cidedly more inclined to settle questions 
than to raise them. 



188] 



September 



One 

It is of no use beginning to air one's 
views until one has collected an 
audience. 

Two 

A man whom fate had pitched into a 
canal might accomplish miracles in the 
way of rendering himself amphibian: he 
might stagger the world by the spectacle 
of his philosophy under amazing diffi- 
culties; people might pay sixpence a 
head to come and see him; but he 
would be less of a nincompoop if he 
climbed out and arranged to live defi- 
nitely on the bank. 



Three 

The contemplation of hills is uplifting to 
the soul; it leads to inspiration and in- 
duces nobility of character. 

[89] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Four 

Plot is the primary thing in fiction. Only 
a very clever craftsman can manipulate 
a feeble plot so as to make it even pass- 
ably interesting. Whereas, the clumsiest 
bungler in narration cannot altogether 
spoil a really sound plot. 



Five 

It cannot be too clearly understood that 
the professional author, the man who 
depends entirely on his pen for the 
continuance of breath, and whose income 
is at the mercy of an illness or a head- 
ache, is eternally compromising between 
glory and something more edible and 
warmer at nights. He labours, in the 
first place, for food, shelter, tailors, a 
woman, European travel, horses, stalls 
at the opera, good cigars, ambrosial 
evenings in restaurants; and he gives 
glory the best chance he can. I am not 
speaking of geniuses with a mania for 
posterity; I am speaking of human 
beings. 

[90] 



SEPTEMBER 



S ix 

The average man flourishes and finds his 
ease in an atmosphere of peaceful rou- 
tine. Men destined for success flourish 
and find their ease in an atmosphere of 
coUision and disturbance. 



Seven 

There are simply thousands of agreeable 
and good girls who can accomplish 
herring-bone, omelettes, and simultane- 
ous equations in a breath, as it were. 
They are all over the kingdom, and may 
be seen in the streets and lanes thereof 
about half-past eight in the morning and 
again about five o'clock in the evening. 
But the fact is not generally known. 
Only the stern and base members of 
School Boards or Education Committees 
know it. And they are so used to marvels 
that they make nothing of them. 

Eight 

In the sea of literature every part com- 
municates with every other part; there 
are no land-locked lakes. 

191] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 




Nine 

With an obedient, disciplined brain a man 
may live always right up to the standard 
of his best moments. 



Ten 

A prig is a pompous fool who has gone 
out for a ceremonial walk, and, without 
knowing it, has lost an important part 
of his attire, namely, his sense of 
humour. 



Eleven 

If I have an aptitude for anything at all 
in letters, it is for criticism. Whenever 
I read a book of imagination, I am 
instantly filled with ideas concerning it; 
I form definite views about its merit or 
demerit, and, having formed them, I hold 
those views with strong conviction. 
Denial of them rouses me; I must 
thump the table in support of them; I 
must compel people to believe that what 
I say is true; I cannot argue without 
getting serious, in spite of myself. 

[92] 



SEPTEMBER 



Twelve 

The great convenience of masterpieces is 
that they are so astonishingly lucid. 



Thirteen 

It is as well not to chatter too much 
about what one is doing, and not to 
betray a too-pained sadness at the spec- 
tacle of a whole world deliberately wast- 
ing so many hours out of every day, and 
therefore never really living. It will 
be found, ultimately, that in taking care 
of one's self one has quite all one can do. 



F urt een 

Think as well as read. I know people 
who read and read, and, for all the good 
it does them, they might just as well cut 
bread-and-butter. They take to reading 
as better men take to drink. They fly 
through the shires of literature on a 
motor-car, their sole object being mo- 
tion. They will tell you how many books 
they have read in a year. 

[93] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Fifteen 

The mass could not, and never at any 
period of history did, appreciate fine art, 
but could and would appreciate and 
support passable deteriorations of fine 
art. 



Sixteen 

Honesty, in literature as in life, is the quality 
that counts first and counts last. 



Seventeen 

No author ever lived who could write a 
page without giving himself away. 



Eighteen 

To be one's natural self is the most 
difficult thing in literature. To be one's 
natural self in a drawing-room full of 
observant eyes is scarcely the gift of 
the simple debutant, but rather of the 
experienced diner-out. So in literature: 
it is not the expert but the unpractised 
beginner who is guilty of artificiality. 

[94] 



SEPTEMBER 



Nineteen 

Much nonsense has been talked about 
the short story. It has been asserted 
that Enghshmen cannot write artistic 
short stories, that the short story does 
not come naturally to the Anglo-Saxon. 
Whereas the truth is that nearly all the 
finest short-story writers in the world to- 
day are Englishmen, and some of the 
most wonderful short stories ever written 
have been written by Englishmen within 
the last twenty years. 



Twenty 

If a book really moves you to anger, the 
chances are that it is a good book. 



T wenty -one 

In the cultivation of the mind one of 
the most important factors is precisely 
the feeling of strain, of difficulty, of a 
task which one part of you is anxious 
to achieve and another part of you is 
anxious to shirk. 

[951 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



T w ent y -two 

The very greatest poetry can only be 
understood and savoured by people who 
have put themselves through a consider- 
able mental discipline. To others it is 
an exasperating weariness. 



T w ent y -t hr ee 

Samuel Johnson's Birthday 
Even Johnson's Dictionary is packed with 



emotion. 



T wen t y -fo ur 



All blame, uttered or unexpressed, is wrong. 
I do not blame myself. I can explain 
myself to myself. I can invariably 
explain myself. 

T went y -f iv e 

When one has thoroughly got imbued 
into one's head the leading truth that 
nothing happens without a cause, one 
grows not only large-minded, but large- 
hearted. 

[96] 



SEPTEMBER 



Twenty-six 

If an editor knows not peace, he knows 
power. In Fleet Street, as in other 
streets, the population divides itself into 
those who want something and those 
who have something to bestow; those 
who are anxious to give a lunch, and 
those who deign occasionally to accept 
a lunch; those who have an axe to grind, 
and those who possess the grindstone. 

T went y -seven 

Regard, for a moment, the average house- 
hold in the light of a business organ- 
isation for lodging and feeding a group 
of individuals; contrast its lapses, 
makeshifts, delays, irregularities, con- 
tinual excuses with the awful precision 
of a city office. Is it a matter for sur- 
prise that the young woman who is 
accustomed gaily to remark, "Only five 
minutes late this morning, father," or 
"I quite forgot to order the coals, dear," 
confident that a frown or a hard word 
will end the affair, should carry into 
business (be it never so grave) the laxi- 
ties so long permitted her in the home? 

[97] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



T went y -e ig ht 

This I know and affirm, that the average 
woman-journalist is the most loyal, 
earnest, and teachable person under the 
sun. I begin to feel sentimental when 
I think of her astounding earnestness, 
even in grasping the live coal of English 
syntax. Syntax, bane of writing- 
women, I have spent scores of ineffec- 
tual hours in trying to inoculate the 
ungrammatical sex against your terrors! 

T went y - n i ne 

I have never refused work when the pay 
has been good. 

Thirty 
There is no logical answer to a guffaw. 



198] 



October 



One 

A most curious and useful thing to realise 
is that one never knows the impression 
one is creating on other people. 



Two 
At seventy men begin to be separated 
from their fellow-creatures. At eighty 
they are like islets sticking out of a sea. 
At eighty-five, with their trembling and 
deliberate speech, they are the abstract 
voice of human wisdom. They gather 
wisdom with amazing rapidity in the 
latter years, and even their folly is wise 
then. 

Three 

In its essence all fiction is wildly im- 
probable, and its fundamental improba- 
bility is masked by an observance of 
probabihty in details. 

[99] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Four 

Only reviewers have a prejudice against 
long novels. 

Five 

The most important of all perceptions is 
the continual perception of cause and 
effect — in other words, the perception 
of the continuous development of the 
universe — in still other words, the per- 
ception of the course of evolution. 



Six 

No reading of books will take the place 
of a daily, candid, honest examination of 
what one has recently done, and what 
one is about to do — of a steady looking 
at one's self in the face (disconcerting 
though the sight may be). 



Seven 

The beauty of a classic is not at all apt 
to knock you down. It will steal over 
you, rather. 

[100] 



OCTOBER 



Eight 

Self-respect is at the root of all purpose- 
fulness, and a failure in an enterprise 
deliberately planned deals a desperate 
wound at one's self-respect. 

Nine 

A man may be a sub-editor, or even an 
assistant-editor, for half a lifetime, and 
yet remain ignorant of the true signifi- 
cance of journalism. 

Ten 

Happiness does not spring from the pro- 
curing of physical or mental pleasure, 
but from the development of reason and 
the adjustment of conduct to principles. 



Eleven 

The heart is convinced that custom is a 
virtue. The heart of the dirty working- 
man rebels when the State insists that 
he shall be clean, for no other reason 
than that it is his custom to be dirty. 

[101] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twelve 

To be honest with oneself is not so simple 
as it appears. 



Thirteen 

"My wife will never understand," said 
Mr. Brindley, "that complete confi- 
dence between two human beings is 
impossible." 



Fourteen 

Demanding honesty from your authors, 
you must see that you render it yourself. 



Fifteen 

Imagine the technical difTiculties of a painter 
whose canvas was always being rolled 
off one stick on to another stick, and 
who was compelled to do his picture 
inch by inch, seeing nothing but the 
particular inch which happened to be 
under his brush. That difficulty is only 
one of the difficulties of the novelist. 

[102] 



OCTOBER 



Sixteen 

It is a fact that few novelists enjoy the 
creative labour, though most enjoy think- 
ing about the creative labour. Novel- 
ists enjoy writing novels no more than 
ploughmen enjoy following the plough. 
They regard business as a "grind." 



Seventeen 

The born journalist comes into the world 
with the fixed notion that nothing under 
the sun is uninteresting. He says: "I 
cannot pass along the street, or cut a 
finger, or marry, or catch a cold or a 
fish, or go to church, or perform any act 
whatever, without being impressed anew 
by the interestingness of mundane phe- 
nomena, and without experiencing a de- 
sire to share this impression with my 
fellow-creatures." 



Eighteen 

Any change, even a change for the better, 
is always accompanied by drawbacks 
and discomforts. 

[103] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Nineteen 

It is much easier to begin a novel than 
to finish it. This statement appUes to 
many enterprises, but to none with more 
force than to a long art-work such as a 
novel or a play. 

Twenty 

^ A true book is not always great. But a 
great book is never untrue. 



Twenty- one 

The impossible had occurred. I was no 
longer a mere journalist; I was an 
author. "After all, it's nothing," I said, 
with that intense and unoriginal human- 
ity which distinguishes all of us. And 
in a blinding flash I saw that an author 
was in essence the same thing as a grocer 
or a duke. 

T w enty -two 

When the reason and the heart come into 
conflict the heart is invariably wrong. 

1 104 ] 



OCTOBER 



T w e nty -i hr ee 

Marriage is excessively prosaic and eternal, 
not at all what you expect it to be. 



Twenty-four 

do not forget that the realism of one 
age is the conventionality of the next. 
In the main the tendency of art is al- 
ways to reduce and simplify its con- 
ventions, thus necessitating an increase 
of virtuosity in order to obtain the same 
effects of shapeliness and rhythm. 



Twenty-five 

For the majority of people the earth is 
a dull planet. It is only a Stevenson 
who can say: "I never remember being 
bored," and one may fairly doubt 
whether even Stevenson uttered truth 
when he made that extraordinary state- 
ment. None of us escapes boredom en- 
tirely; some of us, indeed, are bored 
during the greater part of our lives. The 
fact is unpalatable, but it is a fact. 

[105] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



T wenty -six 

An average of over an hour a day given 
to the mind should permanently and 
completely enliven the whole activity 
of the mind. 



Twenty-seven 

large class of people positively resent 
being thrilled by a work of fiction, and 
the domestic serial is meant to appeal to 
this class. 



Twenty-eight 

It is natural that people who concern 
themselves with art only in their leisure 
moments, demanding from it nothing 
but a temporary distraction, should pre- 
fer the obvious to the recondite, and 
should walk regardless of beauty unless 
it forces itself upon their attention by 
means of exaggerations and advertise- 
ment. The public wants to be struck, 
hit squarely in the face; then it will 
take notice. 

[106] 



OCTOBER 



Twenty -nine 

When a book attains a large circulation 
one usually says that it succeeds. But 
the fine books succeed of themselves, by 
their own virtue, and apart from the 
acclamatory noises of fame. Immure 
them in cabinets, cast them into Sahara; 
still they imperturbably succeed. If, on 
a rare occasion, such a book sells by 
scores of thousands, it is not the book 
but the public which succeeds; it is not 
the book but the public which has 
emerged splendidly from a trial. 



Thirty 

The artists who have courage fully to 
exploit their own temperaments are al- 
ways sufficiently infrequent to be peculi- 
arly noticeable and welcome. Still more 
rare are they who, leaving it to others 
to sing and emphasise the ideal and 
obvious beauties which all can in 
some measure see, will exclusively exer- 
cise the artist's prerogative as an ex- 
plorer of hidden and recondite beauty 
in unsuspected places. 

[107] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



T hirty -one 

Bad books, by flattering you, by caress- 
ing, by appealing to the weak or the base 
in you, will often persuade you what fine 
and splendid books they are. 



[108 



November 



One 

It is well to remind ourselves that lit- 
erature is first and last a means of 
life, and that the enterprise of forming 
one's literary taste is an enterprise of 
learning how best to use this means of 
life. 

Two 

Instead of saying, *' Sorry I can't see 
you, old chap, but I have to run off to 
the tennis club," you must say, '*. . . 
But I have to work." This, I admit, is 
intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so 
much more urgent than the immortal 
soul. 

Three 

A talent never persuades or encourages 
the owner of it; it drives him with a 



whip. 



[109] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Four 

One of the chief things which one has 
to learn is that the mental faculties are 
capable of a continuous hard activity; 
they do not tire like an arm or a leg. 
All they want is change, not rest, except 
in sleep. 

Five 

Characterisation, the feat of individualising 
characters, is the inmost mystery of 
imaginative literary art. It is of the 
very essence of the novel. It never be- 
longs to this passage or that. It is 
implicit in the whole. It is always 
being done, and is never finished till the 
last page is written. 



Six 

Can you deny that when you have some- 
thing definite to look forward to at 
eventide, something that is to employ 
all your energy, the thought of that 
something gives a glow and a more 
intense vitality to the whole day? 

[1101 



NOVEMBER 



Seven 

Most good books have begun by causing 
anger which disguised itself as contempt. 

Eight 

When a thing is supreme there is nothing 
to be said. 

Nine 

Ivan Serge'itch Turgenev's Birthday 
The author of a miracle like On the Eve 
may be born, but he is also made. In 
the matter of condensation alone Tur- 
genev was unique among the great 
literary artificers. He could say more 
in a chapter of two thousand words than 
any other novelist that ever lived. What 
he accomplishes again and again in a 
book of sixty thousand words, Tolstoi 
could not have accomplished under a 
quarter of a million. 

Ten 

Fine taste in fiction is almost as rare 
among novelists as among the general 
public. 

[Ill] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Eleven 

I have never once produced any literary 
work without a preliminary incentive 
quite other than the incentive of ebul- 
lient imagination. I have never "wanted 
to write," until the extrinsic advantages 
of writing had presented themselves to 
me. 

Twelve 

Beauty is strangely various. There is the 
beauty of light and joy and strength 
exulting; but there is also the beauty 
of shade, of sorrow and sadness, and of 
humility oppressed. The spirit of the 
sublime dwells not only in the high and 
remote; it shines unperceived amid all 
the usual meannesses of our daily 



existence. 



Thirteen 



Always give your fellow creature credit 
for good intentions. Do not you, though 
sometimes mistakenly, always act for 
the best? You know you do. And are 
you alone among mortals in rectitude? 

[112] 



NOVEMBER 



Fourteen 

There is no such case as the average 
case, just as there is no such man as 
the average man. Every man and 
every man's case is special. 

Fifteen 

Outside the department of fiction there 
are two kinds of authors — those who 
want to write because they have some- 
thing definite to say, and those who 
want something definite to say because 
they can write. 

Sixteen 

A lover is one who deludes himself; a 
journalist is one who deludes himself 
and other people. 

Seventeen 

Although a very greedy eater of litera- 
ture, I can only enjoy reading when I 
have little time for reading. Give me 
three hours of absolute leisure with 
nothing to do but read, and I instantly 
become almost incapable of the act. 

1113] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Eighteen 

I would point out that literature by no 
means comprises the whole field of 
knowledge, and that the disturbing thirst 
to improve one's self — to increase one's 
knowledge — may well be slaked quite 
apart from literature. 

Nineteen 

The public, by its casual approval, may 
give notoriety and a vogue which passes, 
but it is incapable of the sustained ar- 
dour of appreciation which alone results 
in authentic renown. It is incapable 
because it is nonchalant. To the public 
art is a very little thing — a distraction, 
the last resort against ennui. To the 
critics art looms enormous. They do 
not merely possess views; they are 
possessed by them. Their views amount 
to a creed, and that creed must be spread. 
Quiescence is torment to the devotee. 
He cannot cry peace when there is no 
peace. Passionate conviction, like mur- 
der, will out. "I believe; therefore you 
must believe": that is the motto which 
moves the world. 

[114] 



NOVEMBER 



Twenty 

Only those who have lived at the full 
stretch seven days a week for a long 
time can appreciate the full beauty of a 
regularly recurring idleness. 

T w ent y -0 ne 

Publishers as a commercial class are neither 
more nor less honourable than any 
other commercial class, and authors 
are neither more nor less honourable 
than publishers. In the world of com- 
merce one fights for one's own hand and 
keeps within the law; the code is uni- 
versally understood, and the man who 
thinks it ought to be altered because he 
happens to be inexperienced, is a fool. 

T went y 'two 

There can be no sort of doubt that unless 
I was prepared to flout the wisdom of 
the ages, I ought to have refused his 
suggestion. But is not the wisdom of 
the ages a medicine for majorities? And, 
indeed, I was prepared to flout it, as in 
our highest and our lowest moments we 
often are. 

[115] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty -three 

London is chiefly populated by greyhaired 
men who for twenty years have been 
about to become journalists and authors. 
And but for a fortunate incident — the 
thumb of my Fate has always been 
turned up — I might ere this have 
fallen back into that tragic rearguard 
of Irresolutes. 

Twenty -fo u r 

I think it is rather fine, this necessity 
for the tense bracing of the will before 
anything worth doing can be done. I 
rather like it myself. I feel it to be the 
chief thing that differentiates me from 
the cat by the fire. 

T w enty -f iv e 

The most important preliminary to the 
task of arranging one's life so that one 
may live fully and comfortably within 
one's daily budget of twenty-four hours, 
is the calm realisation of the extreme 
difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices 
and the endless effort it demands. 

[116] 



NOVEMBER 



Twenty-six 

Whatever sin a man does he either does 
for his own benefit or for the benefit 
of society. 

Twenty-seven 

The critic's first requisite is that he 
should be interested. A man may have 
an instinctive good taste, but if his 
attitude is one of apathy, then he is not 
a true critic. The opinions of the pubhc 
are often wrong; the opinions of the 
critic are usually right. But the funda- 
mental difference between these two 
bodies does not lie here; it lies in the 
fact that the critics "care," while the 
public does not care. 

Twenty-eight 

When, after the theatre, a woman pre- 
cedes a man into a carriage, does she 
not publish and glory in the fact that she 
is his? Is it not the most delicious of 
avowals? There is something in the 
enforced bend of one's head as one steps 
in. And when the man shuts the door 
with a masculine snap 

[117] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Twenty-nine 

Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and 
a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly 
for employment; you can't satisfy it at 
first; it wants more and more; it is 
eager to move mountains and divert the 
course of rivers; it isn't content till it 
perspires. And then, too often, when 
it feels the perspiration on its brow, it 
wearies all of a sudden and dies, without 
even putting itself to the trouble of 
saying, "I've had enough of this." 

Thirty 

Literature exists so that where one man 
has lived finely ten thousand may after- 

Ti/nrHs livp. finp.lv- 



wards live finely. 



118] 



December 



One 

To hear a master play a scale, to catch 
that measured, tranquil succession of 
notes, each a different jewel of equal 
splendour, each dying precisely when the 
next was born — this is to perceive at 
last what music is made of, to have 
glimpses of the divine magic that is the 
soul of the divinest art. 



Two 

When the swimmer unclothes, and aban- 
dons himself to the water, naked, let- 
ting the water caress the whole of his 
nakedness, moving his limbs in volup- 
tuous ease untrammelled by even the 
lightest garment, then, as never under 
other conditions, he is aware of his body; 
and perhaps the thought occurs to him 
that to live otherwise than in that 
naked freedom is not to live. 

[119] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Three 

Has it never struck you that you have 
at hand a machine wonderful beyond all 
mechanisms in sheds, intricate, delicately 
adjustable, of astounding and miraculous 
possibilities, interminably interesting? 
That machine is yourself. 



Four 

The sound reputation of an artist is 
originally due never to the public, but 
to the critics. I do not use the word 
"critic" in a limited, journalistic sense; 
it is meant to include all those persons, 
whether scribes or not, who have genuine 
convictions about art. 



Five 

The movement for opening museums on 
Sundays is the most natural move- 
ment that could be conceived. For if 
ever a resort was invented and fore- 
ordained to chime with the true spirit 
of the British Sabbath, that resort is the 
average museum. 

11201 



DECEMBER 



Six 

The manufacture of musical comedy is 
interesting and curious, but I am not 
aware that it has anything to do with 
dramatic art. 

Seven 

Though you have the wealth of a cloak- 
room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, 
you cannot buy yourself a minute more 
time than I have, or the cat by the fire 
has. 

Eight 

The man of business, even in the very 
daily act of deceit, will never yield up the 
conviction that, after all, at bottom he is 
crystal honest. It is his darling delusion. 



Nine 

Happiness is not joy, and it is not tran- 
quillity. It is something deeper and 
something more disturbing. Perhaps it 
is an acute sense of life, a realisation of 
one's secret being, a continual renewal 
of the mysterious savour of existence. 

[121] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Ten 

Our best plays, as works of art, are 
strikingly inferior to our best novels. 
A large section of the educated public 
ignores the modern English theatre as 
being unworthy of attention. 



Eleven 

Romance, interest, dwell not in the thing 
seen, but in the eye of the beholder. 



Twelve 

Every bookish person has indulgently ob- 
served the artless absorption and sur- 
render with which a "man of action" 
reads when by chance a book captures 
him, his temporary monomania, his insis- 
tence that the bookish person shall share 
his joy, and his impatience at any exhibi- 
tion of indifference. For the moment 
the terrible man of action is a child 
again; he who has straddled the world 
is like a provincial walking with open- 
mouthed delight through the streets 
of the capital. 

1122] 



DECEMBER 



Thirteen 

The woman who quarrels with a maid is 
clumsy, and the woman who quarrels 
with a good maid is either a fool or in a 
nervous, hysterical condition, or both. 



Fourteen 

Men have a habit of taking themselves 
for granted, and that habit is responsible 
for nine-tenths of the boredom and 
despair on the face of the planet. 



Fifteen 

Anyone can learn to write, and to write 
well, in any given style; but to see, 
to discern the interestingness which is 
veiled from the crowd — that comes not 
by tuition; rather by intuition. 



Sixteen 

The forms of faith change, but the spirit 
of faith is immortal amid its endless 
vicissitudes. 

[123] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



Seventeen 

Consider the attitude of Dissenters of the 
trading and industrial classes towards 
the art of literature . . . That attitude 
is at once timid, antagonistic, and re- 
sentful. Timid, because print still has 
for the unlettered a mysterious sanction; 
antagonistic because Puritanism and the 
arts have by no means yet settled their 
quarrel; resentful because the auto- 
cratic power of art over the imagination 
and the intelligence is felt without being 
understood. 



Eighteen 

It is said that men are only interested in 
themselves. The truth is that, as a rule, 
men are interested in every mortal thing 
except themselves. 



Nineteen 

It is less difficult, I should say, to succeed 
moderately in journalism than to suc- 
ceed moderately in dressmaking. 

[124] 



DECEMBER 



Twenty 
Music cannot be said. One art cannot be 



translated into another. 



T w enty -0 n e 

deep-seated objection to the intrusion 
of even the most loved male at certain 
times is common, I think, to all women. 
Women are capable of putting love 
aside, like a rich dress, and donning the 
peignoir of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a 
way which is an eternal enigma to men. 



Twenty-two 

There's nothing like a corpse for putting 
everything at sixes and sevens. 

Twenty -three 

Great grief is democratic, levelling — 
not downwards but upwards. It strips 
away the inessential and makes brothers. 
It is impatient with all the unavailable 
inventions which obscure the brother- 
hood of mankind. 

[125] 



ARNOLD BENNETT 



T w en ty-fo u r 

The expression of the soul by means of 
the brain and body is what we call the 
art of "living." 



T w e nt y 'f iv e 

That Christmas has lost some of its 
magic is a fact that the common-sense 
of the western hemisphere will not dis- 
pute. To blink the fact is infantile. 
To confront it, to try to understand it, 
to reckon with it, and to obviate any 
evil that may attach to it — this course 
alone is meet for an honest man. 



Twenty-six 

It must be admitted in favour of the 
Five Towns that, when its inhabitants 
spill milk, they do not usually sit down 
on the pavement and adulterate the 
milk with their tears. They pass on. 
Such passing on is termed callous and 
coldhearted in the rest of England, 
which loves to sit down on pavements 
and weep into irretrievable milk. 

[126] 



DECEMBER 



Twenty-seven 

At thirty the chances are that a man 
will understand better the draughts of a 
chimney than his own respiratory appa- 
ratus — to name one of the simple, 
obvious things ; and as for understanding 
the working of his own brain — what an 
idea! 

Twenty-eight 

Science is making it increasingly difficult 
to conceive matter apart from spirit. 
Everything lives. Even my razor gets 
"tired." 

Twenty-nine 

No book in any noble library is so in- 
teresting, so revealing, as the catalogue 
of it. 

Thirty 

Love is the greatest thing in life; one 
may, however, question whether it 
should be counted greater than life 
itself. 

[127] 



ARNOLD BENNTT 



Thirty-one 

The indispensable preparation for brain- 
discipline is to form the habit of regard- 
ing one's brain as an instrument exterior 
to one's self, like a tongue or a foot. 



[128] 



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